Author of ‘Hitler’s Willing Executioners’ Wrote that He Has ‘Full-Time Security’ When in Germany

There is violence from the extreme right. During the soccer world championship, I think they warned foreigners to not enter certain regions.

The most spectacular case I remember was a black engineer married to a German who has been murdered late at night by a horde some years ago.

There was a wave of violence from the right targeting Muslim, immigrants, asylum seekers in the late eighties. Close to here in Duesseldorf Jewish immigrants from Russia have been the target a couple of years ago.

A scholar from Israel told me he was warned by colleagues in Duisburg to not wear his kippah.

I won't comment concerning Daniel Goldhagen's security needs and never thought about how the state's handles VIPs, but who should know about you or anybody like you that you are Jewish, and not simply Americans?

Which reminds me that I very, very rarely notice Jewish people on the street here in Cologne, with the exception of the orthodox hurrying to the Synagogue close to me, black coat and hat and all, or the rare couples with children who are recognizably Jewish only since their men wear kippahs.

Non of my Jewish & half-Jewish friends would be recognizable as Jews. Most have been living here for several decades, most are American Jews. With some I had talked much about the Nazis, but not once anybody told me anything about experienced antisemitism or violence. But they are mainly artists and don't move in circles that are antisemitic.

Here is a long but important quote from Raul Hilberg,the foremost scholar of the Holocaust. From his piece:The Goldhagen Phenomenon.
"Goldhagen overstates the extent and depth of German anti-Semitism. At the same time he underplays two factors that greatly weaken his basic thesis. One is that not all the shooters were Germans, the other, that not all the victims were Jews.

The killers included ethnic Germans, who were drawn from a population that had lived outside Germany. An ethnic German Kommando, recruited in villages of the Berezovka-Mostovoye region of the western Ukraine, shot more than 30,000 Jews in that area. Moreover, men of ethnic German background were not only shooters but by 1944 they constituted more than a third of the guard force in Auschwitz. Goldhagen does not even mention them. The "executioners" were also Romanians, Croats, Ukrainians, Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians in significant [724] numbers. The Romanian and Croat formations implemented policies of their own governments. The great Odessa massacre of October 1941 was Romanian, and it was Romanian Marshal Ion Antonescu who asked on 16 December 1941, "Are we waiting for a decision to be taken in Berlin?" just before 70,000 Jews were killed by, his men in the Golta prefecture. Thousands of those Jews were burned alive. As to the Croats, there are photographs of what went on in that satellite state. Baltic auxiliaries were absolutely essential to the Germans, as in the case of Latvian street and harbor police who participated heavily in the massive shooting of Jews in Riga. Of the Lithuanian police battalions that were pressed into service, the second is of special interest. In October of that year, it was ordered to go from Kaunas to Byelorussia as a component of the German 11th Reserve Police Battalion. The mission was to kill Jews. Facing the victims, a young Lithuanian declared that he could not shoot men, women, and children, whereupon the company commander, Juozas Kristaponis, invited any of his men with similar objections to move to the side. Some did, most did not. Later, this unit was involved in more killing, and in Slutsk, there were occurrences that prompted a German police officer to call the Lithuanians "pigs."

It would be difficult to ascribe to all of these men, who had not been a part of German society, the kind of German anti-Semitism that in Goldhagen's view harbored an "exterminationist potential." It would be manifestly impossible to connect any anti-Semitism with the origination of killing operations directed at non-Jewish people. Such operations, however, did take place. Approximately a fourth of Germany's own mental patients were gassed. These individuals, selected in asylums, were in no sense regarded as a threat to the German nation. Subsequently, personnel and techniques were literally transferred from the euthanasia stations in Germany to camps in Poland, so that the Jews died, albeit on a much larger scale, like those institutionalized Germans. This sequence was reversed in the case of the Gypsies and Jews when, notwithstanding the very different Nazi conceptions of the two groups, Gypsies were going to be treated like Jews. Thus thousands of Gypsies were shipped to the Lodz and Warsaw ghettos. They were shot at the same time or somewhat later than the Jews in Serbia, Latvia, and Crimea, among other places, and they were gassed in the same chambers that snuffed out the lives of Jews in Kulmhof, Treblinka, and Auschwitz.

What, then, is left to be taken seriously in Goldhagen's book? The perpetrators have been studied for more than fifty years. Valuable works have been written about them in several languages. Given that visible progress, why does this book, so lacking in factual content and logical rigor, demand so much attentions"

hear – here. Strange why didn't this happen when I was younger and surprised that the Brits seemed to have so much trouble with spelling.

actually I have to get a better copy of one article by Ruth Bettina Birn & Volker Riess. They cite Fritz Stern (not only a jekkes, but a historian and a specialis in German history):

Fritz Stern: The Goldhagen Controversy. One nation, one people, one theory?

The astounding reception of so polemical and pretentious a book can hardly be attributed solely to its topic or thesis. Shrill and simplistic explanations of monstrous crimes obviously command attention. But there is more at work here: the author's ceaseless boast of radical originality was endorsed on the book's jacket by two well-known scholars, both distinguished in fields other than German history — and between them praising Goldhagen's work as "phenomenal scholarship and absolute integrity . . . impeccable scholarship, a profound understanding of modern German history . . . obligatory reading." The American and German publishers touted the book with all the great promotional power at their command. Perhaps Goldhagen's manipulated, public-relations-orchestrated success tells us more about the culture of the present than the book's substance tells us about the horrors of the past.

A German journalist, Johannes Heil Sueddeutsche Zeitung.(? or is he the historian and vice president/chancellor of the Jewish University in Heidelberg? – same name) has looked closer into the the pre-publishing activities over here led by my weekly: DIE ZEIT. One of its ediors, Josef Joffe,is part of the neocon network, or German neocon.

Interestingly Konrad Kwiet cited Heil during a symposium of the United States Holocaust Research Institute which resulted in his article not being printed in the resulting publication:

The Willing Executioners/"Ordinary Men" debate. …, United States Holocaust Research Institute … (ed.),1996

Who defines scholarship and what are the exact rules?

Some are deserving of full time security (whether warranted or not, though erring on the side of caution is always prudent), yet President Jimmy Carter was specifically excluded from security assistance when he travelled to Israel. You'd think our extensive financial aid would compel the Israelis to respect the office itself, regardless of their isses with President Carter the man.

Didn't mean to be OT, just thought that it is clear how security precautions are themselves quite selective. A big deal is being made currently about supposed militant death threats against Paul McCartney for wanting to play in Israel. Is there any sort of boycott against Israel the way performers refused to play South Africa back in the day?

LeaNder, I am one of the few people, who has looked in detail at the years 1939-1942 with the ability to read the primary sources in English, Yiddish, Russian, Polish, German, and Hebrew, and in the 90s I had the opportunity to speak with many witnesses before they died or age took its toll on memory.

Joachim, I appreciate some of your material, and some of the people you introduced me to (even if it feels as if you misuse their theories); there are just too many incidences that make me shy away, e.g. your misuse of Martin Buber, or your doubtful use of Shaye Cohen in this context. Remember my question?

Much of your comment feels like you want to clear the Nazis lately. I am aware of the many quislins and supporters of the Nazis in other European states. I even met some, both in England and France by accident. Franco was quite fond of them, and pleased about their help. I am just not interested in any essentially the-Nazis-weren't-so-bad -enterprise, or the Zionists were much more evil. Just as Buber will always be closer to me than the Nazi hordes. What would I have done in the 20s, 30s in Germany or Austria with many parties on the right being outright antisemites? How would I have reacted had I been Jewish. Like Martin Buber, or like Lion Feuchtwanger? I simply don't know.

I don't see how the web pages to which you pointed me belie anything I have written.

I don't know what you allude to here?

Am I doing enough now, when another race has replaced Jews as victims?

Absolutely no doubt, the scapegoat/victim scenario may change.